[MPlayer-users] Re: BUG - Garbled output playing realaudio

[Bryan Alton]

Neil Sleightholm wrote:

> Bryan Alton wrote:
> 
>> That is strange.  The main difference in the new patch is that when
>> creating a packet to make up for a loss it has a choice. There is
>> no fundamental difference in the error detection code.  There are
>> a few extra checks to prevent other RealAudio formats falling
>> into this code - perhaps I have missed some condition.  At the start
>> of new Mplayer patch it should produce a couple of lines of text
>> prefixed by "Live" - these are the parameters of the RealAudio
>> stream.  If you can copy them it might help.
>> 
>> What time of day did this happen ?
> 
> It happened at 16:30 today. The stream was
> "audio/x-pn-multirate-realaudio-live". I have just heard it again on
> Radio 4 and this time although it went wrong for 20s or so, it
> recovered. I must admit I am confused. I am wondering whether my
> internet connection was particularly busy at the time and the packets
> were being dropped locally. I will keep testing and see if it happens
> again.
> 
> Thanks for all your work on this. Incidently the application for this
> is a plugin for the SlimDevices Squeeze box (www.slimdevices.com)
> called AlienBBC.
> 
> Neil

On a number of time I've had problems with r1 & R4 datastreams totally collapsing
either late at night or early morning and Mplayer had to be restarted
to get any output. I'm thinking of running Ethereal in the background to
see what is going on however I need to be listening all the time to 
know where to search in the log and I don't have that time.

In the meantime I have Radio1 running with added messages and while there
are loads of error - it keeps playing.  I have a theory that packet loss is
not load related but related to complexity of the sound in the live 
broadcast and the server can't compress the sound in time as it is live.

I know about AlienBBC and it's great - it's also the reason I'm doing this.
However I have a Roku product so I'm in hiding ! At the time I bought 
the Roku I wanted BBC but also server free radio and the 
Squeezebox 2 wasn't out - otherwise I would have bought it. Anyhow I
feel by fixing Mplayer, I can enjoy BBC properly and give something
back to your efforts. 

Bryan